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“... The talking had been stilted to begin with; it became a conversation. ‘We were walking up a hill quite slowly, much more like gentlemen walking in a Berkshire beechwood after a heavy Sunday lunch.’ With Erasmos, he drove on to Concepción and then to Los Angeles, in Bío Bío, where he saw a railway bridge built by Gustave Eiffel. Hugh flew to Buenos ...”

“... a while emotionally oppressive, and book a flight to San Francisco, really just so as to see a hill. True, there is a northern area called the Heights, which sounds as if it ought to be the Hampstead of Houston, but the altitude in question turns out to be a mere 23 feet: not enough to notice, at least until a tropical storm comes in and the rest of the ...”

“... righteousness and mission. The United States, he says, is a ‘chosen place’, ‘a city on a hill’, ‘the last best hope of man on earth’. The shocks and disillusionments of the last twenty years, his message suggests, were a great aberration. The climax of this effort to seize the high ground of confidence and optimism was the Republican Convention ...”

“... you will be delighted to know that a pub in the Yorkshire town of Otley is to be renamed the Alan Bennett in your honour in order to celebrate Yorkshire Day.’ Fortunately this bizarre baptism is only for a month; were it longer I fear it would soon be reflected in the takings. The body responsible for this kindly gesture is the Otley Pub Club, which ...”

“... strangeness’ of the art of the storyteller. Nowhere is this more clear than in the work of Alan Garner, whose imagination is haunted by goblins. He knows that the strangest thing of all is that, to see them, there is no need to make an expedition to Narnia or the Berkshire Downs. You can watch for them out of the corner of your eye, even in ...”

“... We’re waiting on the front porch of Jack and Sonia Hatch’s three-storey home in Sherman Hill, a desirable district of Des Moines, Iowa. Pillars, parquet flooring, leftish middle-class clutter. It’s a fantastic, warm evening. About sixty of us, a handful of journalists, but mostly Sherman Hill residents, have come to see Bill Bradley, the former New Jersey senator, New York Knicks professional basketball star and Rhodes scholar who wants the Democrats’ nomination for President of the United States ...”

“... politics, mass media, society at large? There is a comic if accidental illustration of this point. Alan de Lille, writes Dronke, said once that ‘because authority has a waxen nose, that can be bent in different ways, she must be fortified by reason.’ Alan, he says, was recalling a phrase of Thierry of Chartres, himself ...”

“... to be appreciated. In Ada’s case it took less than a hundred years. It was in the 1930s, when Alan Turing drew attention to the originality of her work, that Ada got her due, up to a point. In hailing her as ‘the first computer programmer’, posterity makes a claim that is not so much exaggerated as anachronistic. In their brief, well-illustrated and ...”

“... Art Scene in London, which featured several of her paintings. Its curator, the art historian David Alan Mellor, had been fascinated by the subject in general and by Boty in particular since, as a 13-year-old, he saw Ken Russell’s television film Pop Goes the Easel. Shown as part of the arts series Monitor in 1962, it purported to follow a day in the life of ...”

“... of screen comedy, and he points out that the scores for Passport to Pimlico and The Lavender Hill Mob were written by the great French composer Georges Auric, a member with Poulenc and Tailleferre of Jean Cocteau’s Les Six. The Lavender Hill Mob is often seen as a gentle caper comedy, but wrapped up inside this genre ...”

“... Fringe. I had a pretty quiet war really. I was one of the Few. We were stationed down at Biggin Hill. One Sunday we got word Jerry was coming in, over Broadstairs, I think it was. We got up there quickly as we could and, you know, everything was very calm and peaceful. England lay like a green carpet below me and the war seemed worlds away. I could see ...”

“... and vignettes. ‘I am Mrs Sabawala,’ an Indian admirer announces. ‘My house on Malabar Hill is a sermon in stone. Lunch with me tomorrow.’ He takes part in a gala at the Foreign Office to celebrate the visit of the French President in March 1939: ‘It was a tremendous affair, the last of its kind before the war and I could not help referring to ...”

“... and Reformation 1453-1660 by Mary Hollings, which we used in our history classes under H.H. Hill. I imagine most of us remembered this quote and trotted it out in School Certificate a year or so later, and my only thought now is how wearisome it must have been for the examiner reading it again and again. I suppose the Landsknecht’s equivalent gesture ...”

“... of aesthetic theory – a missing link between Kierkegaard and Adorno. For Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, he’s the original Queer wit, who would today have been the toast of Sussex University and Old Compton Street. Oscar Wilde, posing as a Post-Modernist. Like the most obliging of renters, Wilde will be anything you want him to ...”

“... if he hadn’t died at the age of 27, Brooke was, the letter leaves little doubt, a big show-off. Alan Hollinghurst has always had a soft spot for show-offs. In his first novel, The Swimming-Pool Library (1988), the narrator reads a review of a Shostakovich concert that he skipped to spend time with a newish boyfriend, who ‘would have been sitting on my ...”